Sin City: A Dame to Kill For – Written Review

Sin City: A Dame to Kill For
Score: 8 out of 10

It’s been almost a decade since the first Sin City movie came out, and director Robert Rodriguez has reunited once again with comic book legend Frank Miller for another round of cinematic mayhem in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. Since the first film was a big hit, the pair are playing it safe by returning to the same formula and giving audiences more of what they loved — or maybe didn’t love — about the original. There are plenty of stylish visuals ripped right out of the pages of the comics, pulpy stories, and a heightened sense of reality that makes everything more intense and over-the-top than it ever would be in real life.

Like the first film, this one is again made up of several different film noir-style stories. The primary story, based on the popular A Dame to Kill For graphic novel, is by far the most interesting and well-written of them all, probably because Miller wrote it twenty years ago when he was still in his prime. Eva Green delivers a great performance and officially redeems herself after this year’s horrible 300: Rise of an Empire. The other two stories are not based on a comic, and were instead penned by Miller just for the film. They’re entertaining enough, but lack the edge and memorable dialogue that makes Sin City so popular. All three stories take place at different times in the Sin City chronology, which can get confusing.

As for the visuals, A Dame to Kill For is told almost entirely in black and white, with a few colours creeping in here and there for flavour. The stylish design allows Rodriguez and Miller to disguise a lot of the gore behind silhouettes and blown-out colours, giving them a clever way to sneak countless decapitations, dismemberments, and blood sprays past the MPAA with an R rating. Miller once again has a co-director credit on the film because his comics basically serve as storyboards, but to make things a little different, the film was shot in 3D. Taking a world that was meant for the flat pages of a comic and throwing it at you in 3D could have been a mistake, but it actually works really well and the end results remind me of an animated motion comic. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For is a stylish and cool movie with plenty of over-the-top sex, violence, and gore. It’s exactly what we’ve all seen before, but for once, there’s nothing wrong with that.